


To the late are left the bones

by Odyle



Category: The Hour
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-20
Updated: 2013-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-05 07:46:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1091386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Odyle/pseuds/Odyle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She was a coward. Freddie might argue her on the statement, but it was true, whatever he might say.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To the late are left the bones

**Author's Note:**

  * For [favolefata](https://archiveofourown.org/users/favolefata/gifts).



She bundled Freddie into the back of a taxi that took them to her flat. The nurses were sad to see him go and told him as much. Several of the other men on the ward shook his hand and promised to keep in touch. 

Freddie and Bel said nothing on the ride to her building. The few times she looked over at him, his eyes were closed giving him a meditative air. She let him rest, focusing her attention on the world passing by outside the taxi windows. 

When they reached her building, Bel helped him out of the cab and into the building. Freddie could walk, but he had been laid up so long that he was no longer steady on his feet. The attackers had cracked several of his ribs and he was weak as a kitten besides. He couldn’t catch himself if he were to fall, nor could Bel even with the weight he’d lost laid up in bed. 

They made it as far as her livingroom, where she deposited Freddie on the sofa. 

“That wasn’t so bad,” Bel said. 

“Speak for yourself,” Freddie said. “That’s the farthest I’ve walked in two months.” 

His voice was quiet and the words came slowly. The doctors had wired his jaw shut until the fracture healed. The operation left his face bruised purple and yellow with sutures running along the curve of his jaw, and left him looking worse coming out of surgery than he had going in. It was good that Freddie was not a particularly vain man. The red line of the healing suture still stood out against his skin all these weeks later. 

“Would you like the television on?”

“Please.”

Bel switched the television on for him and went off to put on the kettle. 

She stood in the kitchen and waited for the water to boil. For all that she was glad Freddie was out of hospital, she felt uneasy. 

She was a coward. Freddie might argue her on the statement, but it was true, whatever he might say.

For many days, she feared that she would never get the chance to argue him on that point. At first, the doctors hadn’t known if he would ever open his eyes again. His brain might have been so traumatised that he would just slip away slowly as the tissue died off. 

When Freddie had opened his eyes, the doctors had been concerned about swelling in the brain. What hadn’t killed him might still have left him an invalid. Somehow, Freddie had made it through with his wits intact. 

Bel sat by and watched him recover. She visited him every day, often the only visitor he had. Bel brought him food and books and magazines to keep him occupied and placated while confined to bedrest. She told herself that she would read him the letter she had written but never sent. She would read it to him when he was stronger, when he could leave her if he wanted when she had revealed to him her weakness. 

Bel often wondered if she was capable of telling him. It would crush her to lose him again. Sometimes it seemed better not to try. To take the rejection she deserved, and not to seek the relationship she desired so badly.

She brought Freddie his cup and saucer and a straw to drink it with. He’d taken off the knit cap he’d been issued at the hospital. His head had been shaved before surgery and the hair was coming back unevenly. Freddie would need a haircut before he went anywhere else, Bel noted. 

He shot her a sheepish look as he accepted them from her. 

“What is it?” 

“Nothing.” 

“You have to use the straw. I’ll not have you scald yourself with tea on the first night home. The nurses would never trust me to look after you again. You’d be trapped in that hospital for months.” 

“Yes, ma’am” he muttered. 

Bel rolled her eyes at him then went back to fetch her own cup. There was a newsreel playing when she returned to the living room. She sat on the opposite end of the sofa. 

“Are you sure you don’t want to lay down?” Bel asked. 

His eyes had been closed when she first reentered the living room, but had snapped open again to look at her as soon as he heard her moving.

“I’m comfortable here,” he said. 

They watched a clip of Soviets marching in silence. There was little substance to the footage. It told her nothing about them or the world. The columns of men goose stepping blended in her mind with the hundreds of similar clips she had seen over the years. 

“I collected newspapers for you,” Bel said when the newsreel changed to a young socialite cutting a ribbon at a hospital. “They’re in a box in the bedroom. I thought you might want to catch up on what’s been happening in the world.”

“What has been going on?” Freddie asked. 

“Indonesia is expelling Dutch nationals. Two trains collided in Lewisham a few days ago. The crash killed 90 people and injured a hundred more. Ended up crushing the bridge where it happened.”

The world had continued to turn, she wanted to tell him, unsympathetic to her distraction or his condition. She toiled away on The Hour, as she was accustomed to doing. Everyone seemed satisfied with her work, but she had noticed that they trod carefully around her. Sissy was more vigilant about waylaying unwelcome visitors, and Hector did nothing to bait her. 

She looked away from the television to glance at Freddie. His eyes were on her. It was a sharp look that told her she was being obtuse. 

“No, I meant for you.”

The last few months had been a blur. Bel went from Lime Grove to the hospital then back again, frequently sleeping in her office and stopping home only to pick up clothing and possibly a nap. Her days were arranged around visiting him, fitting in her work commitments around the visitor’s hours on his ward. 

“I’ve been waiting for you.”

Freddie closed his eyes and shook his head. 

“And what would you have done if I had died?”

“You didn’t die, Freddie. I’m very grateful for that. I’m grateful for you, Freddie Lyon. I’ve always been, but I’ve never told you... There are many things I haven’t told you.” 

“You have your opportunity,” he said, pulling the throw she had folded over the back of the sofa over himself. “Tell me now.” 

Trumpets crowed from the television. Bel wanted to leap from the sofa and turn the damn thing off, but Freddie had her pinned there. 

“This is not how I thought my life would be,” Bel said. 

“Disappointed?” 

“Never. I was afraid of us, of being with you, for so long because I didn’t know what I was doing. I never told you that. There’s a reason I was waiting for you. I need you, Freddie Lyon. I love you. I’ve loved you for a long time. And that frightens me.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?” 

“Because I’m a coward.”

“Bel Rowley, afraid of a man who, at the moment, can’t bend down to tie his own shoes.”

She might have laughed if all of her concentration hadn’t been bent on staying her tears. Bel wanted to tell him that she feared that she would become her mother, that she would become wholly dependent on a man. She wanted to tell him that the married men had been because she was frightened. Frightened of being with a man who could be hers and hers alone. A married man would never be a man she could come home to, a man that she could depend on. The words simply weren’t there. 

“I’ve spent my life avoiding this. You deserve better.” 

“Avoiding me?” 

“Yes… no… avoiding the fact that I’m in love with you. I wrote you a letter… When you were in San Fransisco I wrote you a letter that I never posted. It was about all of this. I told myself I would read it to you if you ever came home, so maybe you could understand.”

“Well, where is it?” Freddie asked. 

Bel wiped away the beginning of a tear with the back of her hand. 

“I forgot it in my desk at the studio.” 

The tears overcame what defenses she had left. They clouded her eyes and she rushed to brush them away. Bel felt like an idiot. 

“Don’t cry, Moneypenny,” he said. 

Freddie stood and took a few steps toward the kitchen, as if he wanted to fetch something there then stopped and went back to sit beside Bel on the couch. He fished a handkerchief from his pocket and offered it to her. Bel took it, but crushed it in her fist rather than wiping her face dry. 

“Do you love me?” Freddie asked. 

“Didn’t you hear me?” 

“I want to hear it again.” 

“I love you.” 

“And I love you. Nothing else matters to me. What use is there in worrying about the past when we can be together now?”

So many protestations leapt to mind that Bel was overwhelmed. A new round of sobbing racked her body. She wasn’t the Bel Rowley he’d built in his mind, the one to whom he’d written those letters. She was a coward--not the hard heart he’d imagined who loved the news more than she loved any man. 

Freddie gently pried the handkerchief from her fist and set about drying her face for her. He was gentle, dabbing at the tears where they fell. There were gray smudges where he had wiped away trailing mascara. 

“I don’t deserve you,” Bel said.

“What do you mean? Of course you do. We’re a matched pair. It would be a shame to split up the set.” 

He folded the handkerchief and held it up to her nose for her to blow. Her mother had done just the same for her when she was a little girl. 

“Don’t joke, Freddie.” 

“Who says I’m joking? We’ve spent so much time in our lives running away from one another, what do you say we stop running?”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you very much to TadpoleGlee for Britpicking this. Any mistakes that remain are my own.


End file.
